Watch me go

For all those Garmin owners out there, this will come as no surprise, but I'm loving my new watch. It arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately put it to the test at the gym.

I ended up getting the Forerunner 50 (thanks Marriott points!), which isn't nearly as fancy shmancy as some of the other ones people recommended, but it's light and has all the functions I care about. I just want to be able to see my splits for miles, and see how far I've run without counting laps or guessing based on a route I looked up online.

Yesterday, I ran two miles on a treadmill to test the watch's data to the treadmill's numbers. When I hit one mile on the watch, I was at about 1.97 on the treadmill. So, it was pretty darn close to exact, which is good enough for me. The next test was to see if our thoughts on the track at the gym were correct.

No one has been able to tell us exactly how many laps is one mile on our local track. Apparently, that info wasn't given to the people who work there when the place was built. Since it's smaller than the track we'd run on back home in the Chicago area, we ended up guessing that 15 laps was one mile. Well, my handy-dandy Garmin informed me that 17 laps was indeed one mile.

That was bad news, considering I've been keeping a nice log of my mileage this winter. I started running primarily on the track in mid December and have guesstimated that I've done about 100 of my 250 winter miles on said track. If my math's correct, I didn't run about 12 miles that I thought I had. Ah well, from now on I'll at least know my numbers will be accurate.

The watch also came with the cool wireless USB plug-in dealy that can upload your workout data. I played around with that some on my computer last night and was pretty impressed with all the graphs and charts it spit out. I also found that what I thought was a normal pace on the track was actually a whole heckuva lot faster than I was running on the treadmill.

I ran the first mile on the treadmill in 8:01, the second in 7:10 and the third mile, on the track, in 6:50. I didn't realize I was running that much faster on the track. Now I'll know, thanks to my Garminator. That'll definitely help me keep my pace in line when I start up on the long runs again. It also logged my steps =3,846.

It doesn't take much to impress me. Everyone told me I needed this big high-tech Garmin and I think my simple one that I got for the cost of shipping is awesome. People told me I was dumb for not getting one of those video iPods when I bought my little iPod shuffle, but the shuffle has turned out to be a great little gizmo for running.

Stay tuned for more...